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Three Documentary Filmmakers
Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch
Edited by William Rothman
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Book Presentation:
Uses new critical approaches to demonstrate deep affinities in these vastly different filmmakers’ philosophies on film, fantasy, and reality.
Film study has tended to treat documentary as a marginal form, but as the essays in Three Documentary Filmmakers demonstrate, the films of Jean Rouch, Ross McElwee, and Errol Morris call for, and reward, the sort of criticism expected of serious works in any medium. However, critical methods that illuminate what makes Citizen Kane a great film are not adequate for expressing what it is about Rouch's The Funeral at Bongo: The Old Annaï, McElwee's Time Indefinite, and Morris's The Fog of War that makes them—each in its own way—great films as well. Although these filmmakers differ strikingly from one another, their films are deeply philosophical and personal, and explore the paradoxical relationships between fantasy and reality, self and world, fiction and documentary, dreams and film, filming and living. It is a challenge to find terms of criticism capable of illuminating such works, and the essays in this book rise to that challenge.
About the Author:
William Rothman is Professor of Motion Pictures and Director of the Graduate Program in Film Studies at the University of Miami. He is the author of several books, including Documentary Film Classics and Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, and also the editor of several volumes, including Cavell on Film, also published by SUNY Press, and Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film.
Press Reviews:
"Rothman's contributors … all bring fruitful perspectives to bear on their subjects. The pieces vary widely in focus and approach, but the collection is solid and provocative. " — CHOICE
"The force and virtue of this book can be found in the interstices between and among three vastly different auteurs, styles, subjects, and cinematic dispositions. It will cause readers to think of documentary along new and unforeseen paths of inquiry. " — Tom Conley, author of Cartographic Cinema
See the publisher website: State University of New York Press
> From the same author:
Tuitions and Intuitions (2019)
Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy
Subject: Film Analysis
Looking with Robert Gardner (2016)
Dir. Rebecca Meyers, William Rothman and Charles Warren
Subject: Director > Robert Gardner
Must We Kill the Thing We Love? (2014)
Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock
Subject: Director > Alfred Hitchcock
Reading Cavell's the World Viewed (2000)
A Philosophical Perspective on Film
by Marian Keane and William Rothman
Subject: Theory
Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost (1994)
Dir. Michael Brashinsky, Andrew Horton and William Rothman
Subject: Countries > Russia / USSR
The Gorgon's Gaze (1991)
German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror
by Paul Coates, William Rothman and Dudley Andrew
> On a related topic:
The Documentary Audit (2025)
Listening and the Limits of Accountability
by Pooja Rangan
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Faking It (2001)
Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality
by Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe
Subject: Genre > Documentary
Representing Reality (1992)
Issues and Concepts in Documentary
by Bill Nichols
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Adventure of the Real (2010)
Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema
by Paul Henley
Subject: Director > Jean Rouch
Stories Make the World (2025)
Reflections on Storytelling and the Art of the Documentary
by Stephen Most
Subject: Genre > Documentary
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